Month: July 2017

Enlarge (credit: Bill Pugliano & Justin Sullivan, Getty Images)

There aren't many people in the world who can justifiably call Mark Zuckerberg a dumb-ass, but Elon Musk is probably one of them.

Early on Tuesday morning, in the latest salvo of a tussle between the two tech billionaires over the dangers of advanced artificial intelligence, Musk said that Zuckerberg's "understanding of the subject is limited."

I won't rehash the entire argument here, but basically Elon Musk has been warning society for the last few years that we need to be careful of advanced artificial intelligence. Musk is concerned that humans will either become second-class citizens under super-smart AIs, or alternatively that we'll face a Skynet-like scenario against a robot uprising.

Enlarge (credit: Gerard Julien/AFP/Getty Images)

Google's parent company Alphabet has—with relative ease—gulped down the record €2.4 ($2.7 billion) fine slapped on the ad giant by the antitrust wing of the European Commission in June, following a long-running probe of the company's abuse of dominance in Europe's search market.

On Monday, Alphabet reported second quarter net income of $3.52 billion—down 28 percent from the same period a year ago—due to what it said was "the impact of the $2.7 billion European Commission (EC) fine." Alphabet shares barely wobbled, however, following the Q2 results, which saw sales climb to $26 billion, up 21 percent year-on-year. While earnings per share stood at $5.01.

Google is yet to confirm whether it plans to appeal against the penalty, which Brussels' competition chief Margrethe Vestager meted out to the company after she concluded that it had breached EU rules "by promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results, and demoting those of competitors."

Enlarge / Thermal power plant with sun in Genoa, Italy. (credit: Getty Images)

Unless you work at a coal, gas, or nuclear plant, you may not think about water when you think about electricity (certainly at a household level; they don’t mix). But water plays an important part in cooling many power plants, and many power plants also depend on a nearby water source to create steam that drives turbines. So the availability of water for power production is a serious consideration. Not enough water? That power plant could have to shut down. If the water isn’t chilly enough to cool the plant? Same problem.

In a paper published in Nature Energy this week, a group of researchers from the Netherlands estimated how water availability would affect coal, gas, and nuclear plants in the European Union out to 2030. The researchers took into account a changing climate that will likely make water reserves scarcer and warmer, but they also accounted for progressive renewable energy policies in EU member countries, which are already prompting some thermoelectric plants to retire in favor of wind and solar (which need negligible amounts of water to operate). The researchers also counted new coal, gas, and nuclear plants that are in the planning or construction stages and will likely come online before 2030.

The model tracked the “water footprints” of 1,326 thermoelectric power plants in Europe (that is, the amount of water they need to operate), as well as 818 water basins from which those plants draw water. The researchers found that by 2030, plants along 54 water basins could experience reduced power availability because of lack of water for cooling or steam production, up from 47 in 2014. If the EU were to experience summer droughts like those that occurred in 2003 or 2006, power shortages would follow, the paper noted.

Enlarge (credit: Supergiant Games)

Role-playing games and sports video games have more in common than you think. Decades ago, series like Sensible World of Soccer and Tony La Russa Baseball (on PC, not console) filled their career modes with lots of money- and roster-management menus. Modern major-league games and soccer games like FIFA 17 have carried those traditions over, sporting enough card-slotting and story-driven career modes to make them a hat and a wizard robe away from being a full-blown adventure.

But what if a sports game went further with its RPG elements? What if it had a high-stakes, internal-drama story, where relationships between teammates—along with the winners and losers you confront along the way—affected everything from the storytelling to the number-crunching min-max possibilities? I invite the big dogs at EA Sports, 2K Games, and Sony Santa Monica to look at a tremendous example of that experiment: Pyre, out today from Supergiant Games.

Pyre is a departure from the top-down, world-roaming adventures of Supergiant's previous games Bastion and Transistor. It's definitely not a Zelda-like quest with gritty narration, but it does see Supergiant continuing its streak of taking an established genre and saying, "we're gonna build a helluva narrative and aesthetic world in there."